Measuring Group Differences in High-Dimensional Choices: Method and Application to Congressional Speech / Matthew Gentzkow, Jesse M. Shapiro, Matt Taddy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gentzkow, Matthew.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Shapiro, Jesse M.

Taddy, Matt.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w22423.

NBER working paper series no. w22423

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Measuring Group Differences in High-Dimensional Choices

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2016.

Summary:

We study the problem of measuring group differences in choices when the dimensionality of the choice set is large. We show that standard approaches suffer from a severe finite-sample bias, and we propose an estimator that applies recent advances in machine learning to address this bias. We apply this method to measure trends in the partisanship of congressional speech from 1873 to 2016, defining partisanship to be the ease with which an observer could infer a congressperson's party from a single utterance. Our estimates imply that partisanship is far greater in recent years than in the past, and that it increased sharply in the early 1990s after remaining low and relatively constant over the preceding century.

Notes:

Print version record

July 2016.